What is instructive about this is the factual denialism. Just as fresh water Hayek inspired rattle shaking Shamen dispute the proven reality of Keynes in the macro world (and similar to the problem classical Physics has with Quantum equations appalling record of being predictively correct despite being counter-intuitive) so it is in the micro manipulated world of Mr. Market which has the galling indecency not to realize that the sky is falling despite the urgent claims of Rupert Murdoch Henny Penny.
Wall Street Journal Upset That Wall Street Isn’t Upset About Net Neutrality
by Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt
Fri, Feb 27th 2015 10:34am
A few weeks ago, after it was more or less confirmed that the FCC was going forward with full Title II reclassification of broadband, we noted that the stocks of the big broadband companies actually went up suggesting that Wall Street actually knows that reclassification won’t really impact broadband companies, despite what they’ve been saying publicly. Perhaps this is partly because those same companies have been telling Wall Street that the rule change won’t have an impact.
However, for the Wall Street Journal — which has become weirdly, obsessively, anti-net neutrality — this is an abomination. The newspaper has spent months trying to whip everyone into a frenzy about how evil net neutrality is, using some of the most blatantly wrong arguments around. Just a few days ago, the WSJ turned to its former publisher, now columnist, L. Gordon Crovitz to spread as much misinformation as possible. This is the same L. Gordon Crovitz who a few years ago wrote such a ridiculously wrong article on the history of the internet that basically everyone shoved each other aside to detail how he mangled the history. He, bizarrely, insisted that the government had no role in the creation of the internet. Crovitz also has a history of being wrong (and woefully uninformed) about surveillance and encryption. It’s difficult to understand why the WSJ allows him to continue writing pieces that are so frequently factually challenged.
Actually, it’s not difficult at all.
In this latest piece, Crovitz suggests that Ted Cruz didn’t go far enough in comparing Obamacare to net neutrality, arguing that net neutrality is even “worse.”
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The paper of record for Wall Street, which normally likes to suggest that markets are “right” about everything, is absolutely positive that the markets are wrong about this. And it’s furious. It has an article demanding that broadband investors need to “wake up” to what’s happening with net neutrality.
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At the end of the article, the WSJ pretends that maybe the reason why stocks are up is because investors expect that the broadband players will win an eventual court battle, but that seems like wishful thinking on multiple levels. Let’s go with Occam’s Razor on this one. The market is up because everyone knows that Title II won’t make a huge difference at all for the prospects of broadband companies. Multiple Wall St. analysts have been saying this for months, as have the big broadband companies to the analysts themselves.
La, la, la, la, la.
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